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Anime Review: ‘Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!’

This show is everything that’s wrong with anime today, but not for the reasons you’ve been told.

Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, directed by Kazuya Miura. Studio ENGI. 4 episodes (at time of writing) of 22 minutes (approx. 88 minutes). Ongoing. Rated TV-14.

Available on Funimation.

This show annoys me.

Mind you, its existence doesn’t annoy me, and its content doesn’t particularly annoy me; what annoys me is that this plotless, generic, milquetoast series is the most talked-about anime of the season. That’s how far this medium has fallen over the last two decades.

Granted, it might not be getting so much attention if some busybodies hadn’t had a conniption over it. In 2019, before the anime appeared but while the manga was enjoying some popularity, the Japanese Red Cross did a blood drive using the titular heroine, Uzaki-chan, as a mascot. The poster features her playfully goading you into giving blood by asking if you’re a wimp afraid of needles.

Uzaki-chan Red Cross Poster — The infamous poster, shamelessly borrowed from Baudattitude.com.

A blogger known as Unseen Japan criticized this poster and proceeded to bother lots of people about it. Here are his own sanctimonious words on the subject:

Uzaki, in other words, is explicitly appealing to heterosexual men via her sex appeal. And she’s goading them into giving blood by bringing their manhood into question. (“You’re not afraid of a little shot, are ya, ya wimp?”)

My first reaction—and my wife’s to boot—was that this wasn’t an appropriate image for the Japanese Red Cross to use.

After hiding behind his wife’s skirt, he goes on to claim victimhood status because he got pushback for being an irritant. Perhaps the strangest comment in his lengthy essay on the fallout from this is his assurance, “… I have absolutely no grip [sic] with ecchi anime, or with sexualized depictions of men and women ….”

In other words, he has no ethical ground to stand on; were he a Puritan with an actual moral code, his busybodiness would be tolerable or at least self-consistent, but by his own admission, he made a nuisance of himself simply for the sake of being a nuisance.

Also, LOL at “heterosexual men,” as if that’s some unique or special category. Newsflash: Men are attracted to large breasts; follow Unseen Japan for more groundbreaking discoveries.

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Chobits: Peace and Fear

I hate Chobits, as I’ve made clear more than once. I have enough on my plate that my essay on it is long in coming, but in the meantime, I recommend the above YouTube video from a user by the name of “Hiding in Public.”

Hiding in Public has a very different take on Chobits from my own, but I find it quite thoughtful, so I think it is worth hearing, and after I get my own essay up, his discussion will make for a good counterpoint to what I’ll have to say. Check it out.

Anime Review: ‘Darling in the FRANXX’

Where “riding a giant robot” takes on a new meaning.

Darling in the FRANXX, written by Naotaki Hayashi, et al. Directed by Atsushi Nishigori. Starring Yûto Uemura, Kana Ichinose, and Nanami Yamashita. A-1 Pictures / Trigger, 2018. 24 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 576 minutes). Not rated.

Available on Crunchyroll.

Darling in the FRANXX made a stir when it appeared in 2018, though most of the buzz that reached my ears had little to do with the quality of the show itself. On the one hand, I saw people praising it because they regarded its heroine, a girl called Zero Two, as good waifu material—humorous, of course, but not serious criticism. On the other hand, and much more bizarre, I saw people attacking it because the show’s ultimate message is (gasp) that marrying and having children might be worthwhile things to do.

It is a strange world where such a message is controversial, yet here we are.
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#Memes

Anime Review: ‘Ultra Maniac’

Ultra Maniac, written by Miho Maruo and directed by Shinichi Masaki. Music by Toru Yukawa. Starring Akemi Kanda, Yuie Hori, and Hiroshi Kamiya. Based on the manga by Wataru Yoshizumi. Ashi Productions, 2003. 26 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 10 hours and 24 minutes). Not rated.

Available on Crunchyroll.

The oddly named Ultra Maniac is a minor classic of the magical girl genre from the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although lackluster in its animation and presenting a more-or-less conventional plot, it contains enough unusual elements to make it stand out, and its satisfying ending comes as a genuinely pleasant surprise even if it could have been better set up.

A photograph of Nina and Ayu smiling — Nina and Ayu, our protagonists.

This anime is based on a manga by Wataru Yoshizumi, who’s most famous for Marmalade Boy. The manga and anime versions of Ultra Maniac, however, bear little resemblance to each other, as the former is more of a romantic comedy with magical elements while the latter is a straight-up magical girl show complete with the standard transformation sequences and McGuffin hunt.

Nina in her magical girl costume — Nina transforms … into possibly the frumpiest magical girl outfit ever.

The bizarre title is apparently in reference to the enthusiasm for manga that a couple of the characters have (maniac or mania being an older term for otaku), though this is downplayed in the anime to the point that the title is merely weird.

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‘Key: The Metal Idol’: The Final Verdict

Dude, that was so metal.

Key: The Metal Idol. Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

This is an amazingly good show with haunting imagery, a brilliant story line, a satisfying conclusion, and one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in an anime. It’s not perfect, and the need to rush what was supposed to be its final half was nearly a disaster, but in spite of that, Satō and his obviously very capable crew of animators managed to pull this off.

A robot grabs an injured man's face from behind — A bad Monday at the office.

What’s most amazing to me about this, now that I’ve watched it, is that it’s not better known. It was overshadowed by other anime that came after it and that, in my humble opinion, were equally ambitious but not nearly as good—and certainly not nearly as intelligible. It is perhaps particularly astounding that they accomplished all that they did when the show was released specifically as an “experimental” title and sold extra-cheap. It was made with no faith that it could succeed.

Although it doesn’t look so strange nowadays when grimdark is the rule, we may guess some reasons why it was a risk at the time: Key takes some beloved tropes from Japanese culture head-on. It pulls apart Japan’s love of mecha and idols and robot girls. It deliberately makes all of these things look sick.

Key extends her hands toward the viewer — Key uses her power.

As a side note, for the teaser image of this post, I used what is probably the most iconic moment in Key: This image of her bursting nude from a robot’s body was reinterpreted in cover art and was subsequently reproduced in miniatures. This is basically an image of a young girl ripping a robot apart with her bare hands, an image that’s unquestionably striking and might have been stirring to its target audience of Nineties otaku.

Because this blog attempts to be halfway family-friendly, I had to clip the bottom part of the image; similarly, Pioneer had to censor the box art when releasing the original English dub:

Box art from Pioneer in which Key bursts from a robot — Those big metal chunks were not originally stretching across her chest or groin.

The grand finale, a movie-length “episode,” begins with an impatience-creating build-up. First, it opens with some of the most bizarre imagery from the series displayed under an extended version of the opening theme song. Then the screen goes black for almost half a minute while tense music plays and the opening credits start. So it takes its sweet time getting going.

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episode 14

Protip: If you’re developing super-secret military robots in order to sell them to a foreign power, don’t send them walking all over Tokyo while simultaneously using them to run an idol business.

Key: The Metal Idol, episodes 14, “System.” Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

The good news is that it’s not a complete disaster. The bad news is that it’s not all it could have been.

Shattered arm of a robot idol — What a disaster.

Through its thirteen-episode run, Key: The Metal Idol ratcheted up the tension with a measured and deliberate pace. Then, as so often happens to anime, the money fell through. Instead of producing another thirteen episodes as originally planned, Hiroaki Satō created two ninety-minute movies to finish off the story. This is the first of those two.

This movie is a massive infodump. Most of the “plot” consists of two guys sitting on a park bench and drinking beer while discussing Key’s extensive backstory. Occasionally, these sequences are punctuated by scenes of a crazy dude talking to himself … and discussing Key’s extensive backstory.

Tataki and Kagami talk in a park — “And then this chick was like, ‘I’m a robot,’ and I was like, ‘No way.'”

Although this is a terrible way to make a ninety-minute film, it nonetheless displays the consummate skill of the people working on this project, in that they succeeded in making much of this actually interesting. Yes, I definitely got antsy and fidgety at parts, but it really is a good story that the characters are telling each other, interspersed with arresting imagery and intriguing flashbacks. It finishes off with a good cliffhanger ending that sets up for the next, and final, film.

Miho gloats over Tsuruki, who's tied to a chair — This looks like my last date.

Also, I must give Key: The Metal Idol credit for laying its storyline at our feet in this way. Other anime that ran out of resources (I’m thinking mostly of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is back in the news thanks to Netflix’s new dub) simply gave up on storytelling and took refuge in opacity and esoterica instead. By contrast, instead of telling us, “You just don’t understand because we’re deeply symbolic and stuff,” Key says, “We gotta tap out, but here’s a lengthy description of what’s happening before we go.”

I respect that.

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episodes 12 and 13

Key: The Metal Idol, episodes 12–13, “Virus,” Parts 1 and 2. Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

We have now arrived at the final of the thirteen episodes of Key: The Metal Idol, and we may in a sense call this the end of the series. Originally, this series was supposed to be twenty-six episodes, but as often happens with anime, the money and other resources fell through, so the series rushed to its conclusion. According to common opinion, the first of the movies is a massive infodump and the second is a bunch of incoherent weird stuff. We’ll see for ourselves when we get to them.

And the weird stuff, at least, may have been planned from the beginning: After all, this anime makes a brief Easter egg homage to Eraserhead:

A close-up of Eraserhead placed on a shelf in a video store — I’m a big fan of David Lynch’s famous body horror “ERASER BEAD.”

These two episodes end as the first half of a series often will, with a minor victory for the protagonists and the promise of a new direction.

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episode 10

Key: The Metal Idol, episode 10, “Bug.” Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

Hard to believe we have only a few episodes left until it’s time for the two movies.

Akane and Key are still looking for their big break, but it may come in the form of the creepy, bespectacled naked dude we saw in the two episodes previous. As it turns out, Tataki, who knows a lot of the ins and outs of the idol industry, recognizes him: He’s none other than Hikaru Tsurugi, a genius with many careers and his hands in many projects.